General Information

The written language of Valikari is logical and phonetic in the sense that every Valikari letter represents one sound only. Every sound used in Valikari is represented by a single letter.

What does this mean?

In English, many letters represent more than one sound. For example, the letter C can sound like an S or like a K. (Perversly, it has no sound of its own.) This means that there are two letters that sound like an S and, if you count Q, three letters that sound like a K. In Valikari, you have one character that sounds like an S and one character that sounds like a K.

Also, in english there are sounds represented by multiple letters that are not a culmination of the sounds of the individual letters. In Valikari, the sound for the English CH is represented by a single character. As is SH, TH (hard,) TH (soft) and NG. Since multiple letters do not assume a different sound, successive vowels are pronounced individually.

The Valikari Language utilizes 34 unique sounds and therefore, the alphabet contains 34 unique characters: 9 vowels and 25 consonants. The number of vowels may surprise you until you realize that in English, the letter A alone represents at least 4 seperate vowel sounds.

When writing Valikari words with English characters, it will be neccesary to try to spell it phonetically in English. Since some of the sounds don't exist in English, a bit of flexibility is required, such as using JH for the soft J sound. Since this sound so closely resembled a ZH I opted to only use one of them in the language.

The script at the top says "Valikari Surielin." Surielin [su-ri-el-in] is the Valikari work for "language."

I have created a true-type font using the Valikari alphabet. Since we only have 26 letters in our alphabet (actually 52, since we have upper and lower case letters) as opposed to the Valikaran 34, you cannot blithely type away with the new font and have it work for you. In Valikari, there is no difference between upper and lower case letters. In most cases, using upper or lower case will produce the same result using this font. However, some of the letters have been assigned to upper case keys. Therefore, it would be advisable to review the key before using the font. Also, it is imperative that you disable any autocorrect feature of your word processing software to prevent letters from being capitalized without your knowledge.

Another option would heve been to incorporate pronunciation symbols for the English characters and have them specifically correspond to the Valikari character. I elected not to do this since most people don't know how to utlize pronunciation symbols while typing. If some scholarly type wishes at some later date to define the Valikari sounds using English characters and pronunciation symbols to correct my English spelling of Valikari words I have no objection.

Language Rules

The following are some of the established language rules for Valikari:

Pronouns and Masculine/Feminine:

One difference to note between Valikari and English is that while the language will allow you to specify gender, Valikari also provides non-gender specific personal pronouns. If one needs to specify "that male person" or "that female person" he/she may do so. However, the Valikari word su simply means "that person" without regard to gender, replacing most instances of "he" or "she." This avoids the clumsy "he/she" method of showing that either or both genders are indicated. This attitude is carried forward and there are no distinctive masculine or feminine forms for words.

When combining roots or adding prefixes/suffixes to create new words: when doing so creates a double letter, the letters may be seperated by an apostrrophe.

Verb handling:

Present tense, gerund and the infinitive forms are identicle.
There is no differentiation between past tense and past participle.

Past tense: -an
Future tense: -el

Negative: va-
Positive: la-

Noun handling:

Plural: se-
Possessive: (consonant) -i or (vowel) –ri

Adverbs

"-ly" equivalents are not used. Instead of adding this suffix, the word is preceded by the word so, which means "with."

Adjectives

To formulate an adjective from an existing word, add the suffix -kash.

Sshoijh refers to the one seeing, the act of seeing, that which is seen, and the inter-relationship of the three. It can also imply that the action is going in both directions.
A bo sshoijh can be taken to mean "we see each other."

Compound word structure:

Words may be combined to form new words. Sequence of root components is more of a sound issue than a grammatical one. How further adding of suffixes/prefixes affects the new word combination must be taken into account. This is particularly important when one of the words has both a noun and verb form, as is the case with osoveran,shown below in noun form as osoveranira as opposed to veranosoira or veraniraoso.

Jhemari:

Today

Jhe:

Day

+

Mari:

This

Osoveranira:

Book

Oso:

Big; large.

+

Veranira:

Something written.

Sounds and the Alphabet

The charts below show which keyboard values are assigned to the Valikari characters and the sounds that the characters represent. Above each Valikari character is the key to which the character value is assigned. Below the Valikari character is a pronunciation hint. Note that some of the characters are assigned to more than one keyboard key.

You will note that Valikari utilizes neither silent letters nor dipthongs. Every letter receives full pronunciation.